


sunshine (of your love)

by qannibalism (wip_wizard)



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, will calls himself straight, yes you can laugh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 05:27:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28969059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wip_wizard/pseuds/qannibalism
Summary: clear away the dust to truly see. (aka: hannibal gets spooked by their first kiss bc Trauma probably and they work it out)
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 70





	sunshine (of your love)

The kiss is awkward, like it was almost an accident. Faces too close together for a brief moment, cross eyed speculation of one another, and Will acted on an instinct he’d learned before Hannibal. An instinct not quite conducive with what he and Hannibal were- what they could function as. Will kissed Hannibal barely, quick and soft. Will wouldn’t call it a mistake, but it felt like one at first. 

Hannibal pulled his face away, just far enough to see Will, study him. He was unsure if he’d truly felt that gentle press of lips or if he’d imagined it again, like the hundreds of times before. Long seconds stretched by until it was clear, and like the hundreds of times before, Will had found a way to surprise him. It never got easier, being surprised. 

It was as if Will were a curl of smoke, crawling into the deepest places and under tightly locked doors to fill rooms that had formerly been declared untouchable. Hannibal straightened then, too quick and stiff for his own liking, and walked away. The mask was in too many pieces to put back together in front of an audience. 

Will watched him walk away, a familiar sight. With everyone, really. He bitterly remembered this kind of emptiness from a shaky moment with Alana in his home- covered in chimney dust- after yet another kiss. He was beginning to think his lips were the curse. But this was a deeper, more cavernous emptiness than then, one he couldn’t talk better with the help of his therapist. Well, not his therapist. And not about to talk to him, or kiss him back.

Hannibal was polite and made vapid conversation from behind the mask, but the moment went untouched. They were, mutually, the furthest thing from professional with one another, but it lasted two _fucking_ weeks. Two weeks- Hannibal didn’t look at Will longer than he had to, didn’t touch him, didn’t dare speak to him beyond his starchy civility. Will wished he could crack his skull open to know what was happening inside, or that Hannibal would talk about it like a normal person. For a therapist, he was a hypocrite about his own feelings. 

Will had had enough during a painfully quiet dinner over a memorably chatty pig. He couldn’t deduce what he’d done wrong that day when they kissed besides being himself- which was something Hannibal never minded- and he was seconds from murdering someone he _really_ didn’t want to murder (anymore).

“Did my empathetic skills fail me?” Will asks, eyes on his elaborate plate.

“Pardon?” Hannibal focused on the fork.

“You heard me.” Will dared eye contact. “Traditionally, people only learn when they’re corrected. If I’ve done something wrong I’d like to be corrected.”

But he knew- or he thought he knew- how painfully right he was in that moment. So many moments before had felt wrong because they hadn’t kissed- incomplete sentences. That kiss was a semicolon, a natural progression. 

Hannibal wasn’t at a loss for words, rather, found it difficult to piece together the ones that mattered for this moment. “You did nothing wrong.”

“It feels an awful lot like I’m being punished.” Will grit his teeth, imagining bones between his molars for relief. 

“If anything I’m punishing myself.” The sun is too bright to stare at for too long, so Hannibal looked away from Will again. 

“Please, do explain.”

When you clean an abandoned room, decades of dust enter the air, and every breathe feels heavy. Your nostrils become black, your skin itches where the dust falls, and you tear up to push it from your eyes. And when you clean an abandoned room, you must clean it more than once. The dust left clinging to the draft returns to the shelves and floors like snow. And it snows, again and again, and it’s cleared, again and again. Until the air is clear enough for sunshine to pass through windows as intended, and breathing is easy, and you no longer itch or cry. When you’ve left a room to sit for long enough, the first steps inside kick up enough dust to kill a man. 

Hannibal wants, desperately, for whatever clarity and warmth Will can offer. Has always wanted, in the way a room craves inhabitance and sunshine. But the dust is thick there, locked and untrodden. 

“You surprised me.” 

Will let out a bitter laugh, his utensils dropping with a clang. “Don’t I always?”

“Yes.” 

“Then what about this surprise drew the walls up?” Will had made many personal exceptions for Hannibal, one of which was his definition of love. He never wanted to think about his sexuality, but Hannibal made him realize he had something to think about. The next question was sour. “Is this not what I thought? Is this where the flexible boundaries finally stop?” 

If Hannibal could have manifested the doubt in a physical form and strangled it, he would have. “All I want is all of you. There is no boundary that can stop me.” 

“This boundary wasn’t a problem with Alana.”

“You are not Alana.”

“I am not a woman.”

“And I am not a man with preferences confined to gender.”

Will clenched his jaw, and Hannibal became quiet. 

“You are an outlier Will. So far removed from anyone else I’ve ever encountered.” Hannibal’s broad shoulders sagged, and he looked up to meet Wills stare. “My only outlier.”

Will could see the frayed edges of Hannibal’s facade like a halo around his bowed head. If anything, Will should be the hesitant one, but here they were. Mirror images of the same kind of growing pains, different circumstances. 

“I need time,” Hannibal confessed. To be eased gently. Fostered with patience. House cleaned again and again until fully, truly clean. Will saw the sun and the dust, glittering together like the surface of opaque water. He began to _see._

Kisses for others had been kept in a sterile room alongside polite smiles and handshakes. His kiss, their kiss- and whatever would follow- it would stay in this dusty, once locked room. It was an honor, to work for a warm place to stay inside one another. Will vowed to make it a home.

The dust around them still itched, made every step wary and each breath unsure. Awkward beginnings, akin to learning a new dance. But in the kitchen after dinner, dishes dried and put away, Will began the long work of perfecting his dedication. 

Hannibal leaned against the counter for stability, and Will took his face in one warm hand. And Will held him, and kissed him, and let Hannibal feel his clarity. Like a dream, to be held by the light. 

And again, and again, over weeks and months, kisses until the light could fill the room. And the dark dust had no home beside the sun.

**Author's Note:**

> i guess my personal version of Hannibal is a soft squishy outlier but i'm here to have fun. thank u for reading?? <<33 also why does sunshine of your love by cream sound like smoke on the water??? i also dont know if i've rated this right eek haha


End file.
